Beach Therapy
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Booth looks back and recalls how a day at the beach restored him in ways he couldn't have imagined after returning home from the Gulf War with a shattered body and broken heart. A glimpse of pre-canon soldier!Booth in the summer of 1991.


**Beach**** Therapy**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_I went to the beach for Labor Day weekend. 80% of this story was actually written on the beach, on my iPhone, while I wiggled my toes in the sand. A little bit of the writing equivalent of method acting, perhaps. In any case, t__his is what the muse spit out. I hope you enjoy it (and for my American and Canadian readers, the rest of your Labor Day weekend)! _

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_Beach therapy,_ he called it.

"What the hell is _beach therapy_?" I asked with a snort.

My physical therapist, Lieutenant Jamie Sauer, cocked his head and shot me an annoyed look that said, _"Come on, really?"_

I cinched up the laces on my running shoes and stood up next to the leg press machine, shaking my legs loose as I got ready to show him that I'd finally reached the goal I had set for that part of my lower-body strength training: 425 pounds. I'd been working with Lt. Sauer since after the second of four surgeries I'd endured since arriving at Walter Reed from Iraq three months earlier.

"Sorry," I said with a faint snicker. "I mean, we've done strength training, resistance training, aquatherapy, balance exercises, yoga and a dozen other things to get me squared away again. But _beach therapy? _Sounds like somebody—" I quirked a brow and shot him a pointed look. "—blew through all their leave and is trying to come up with a way to get Uncle Sam to pay for a boondoggle weekend on the shore." I did a couple of slow calf raises, then narrowed my eyes and shot him another skeptical look before I smirked and coughed, "Sir."

Sauer rolled his cool blue eyes and shook his head. We'd been working together on my rehabilitation for months, and after the first four days, we set aside the formalities of rank and agreed to call one another by our last names when it was just the two of us in the room.

"You know," he said, crossing his strong, anvil-like arms in front of his chest as he watched me settle into the leg press machine. He checked the plates to make sure they were secure before I started then, with a nod, gave me the go-ahead to begin as he continued.

"Most guys around here would be damn near jumping out of their skins to be told that the next phase of their treatment was gonna be a trip to the beach. But not you, you big-mouthed, cocky bastard. You're a real piece of work, Booth, to be giving me a hard time about this." He reached up and scratched the back of his close-buzzed blond high-and-tight and shrugged. "I mean, hey, if you're not interested and you'd rather spend another week jacking around here playing pool and watching movies in the patient lounge before we can schedule your final assessment, that's fine with me, I just figured that—"

"It's not that, uh…" I stuttered but fell quiet as I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth and extended my legs, wincing as I put every ounce of energy, strength and concentration into pushing that plate up along with the 425 pounds of barbell weights. I wanted to show Sauer—and, by extension, the U.S. Army—that I was _back_.

As far as I was concerned, I was better than back: I was stronger than I'd ever been, no thanks to the Iraqi Republican Guard, who captured me in Samawah and took me to one of their nasty prisons where they pulled out all the stops, using every trick in the book—bright lights, sleep deprivation, beatings, electric shock torture (applied to my fingers, toes, tongue and, yes, even my testicles) and, finally, when all else failed, by having my feet clubbed with a hard leather blackjack until the long bones of both my feet fractured and dislocated from the smaller bones in the middle of my foot, just in front of my heels.

When I got to Walter Reed on March 4th, 1991, I had a cracked molar that had grown infected after drinking dirty water during my captivity (which forced me to have a root canal and get a crown on that tooth), a fungal infection on my skin from laying in God-only-knows-what on the damp floor of my prison cell, dozens of shards of shrapnel in my back and thigh from the last firefight I was in before I was captured (when I shielded my wounded buddy Matthews from a grenade that rolled by us, kicking it far enough away that it didn't tear us both to smithereens when it blew), and two feet so badly broken that it took four screws and a half-dozen steel wires to put them back together again.

Within hours after arriving at Andrews Air Force Base aboard a C-17 medevac, I was sent into surgery to remove the shrapnel from my back and right thigh. I had another one two days later to put the bones in my feet back where they were supposed to be and hold them in place with screws and wires, a third surgery six weeks later to remove the wires, and a fourth six weeks after that to remove the screws. I spent seven weeks in a wheelchair, waiting for my feet to heal well enough to put weight on them again, and in late April—two months to the day after I air-assaulted into Iraq with the rest of the 101st Airborne Division—I began physical therapy so I could more or less learn to walk again. Two months later, after working my ass off in the gym, on treadmills and jogging around the grounds at Walter Reed, I was ready to prove that I was every bit as strong and high-speed/low-drag as I was when the Iraqis picked me up in Samawah.

I glanced at Sauer with a bit of a smug grin as I finished four sets of ten reps at 425 pounds and slowly let my legs fold up beneath the weight until it hit the safety bracket, then crawled out and rolled onto my feet. I could feel the warm burn in my calves and thighs, but it was a good burn, the kind that told me I'd pushed my body but not too far. I shook out the twitchiness in each of my legs, then propped my hands on my hips and looked up at Sauer.

"So what's the catch?" I asked him, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. "I mean, 'cause you and I both know I'm in better shape now than I was when I shipped off to the desert last year."

My therapist just looked at me, his pale blue eyes blinking back with a silent chuckle. Although I'd never told Sauer what I was doing, he was no fool, and I think he recognized fairly quickly that the targets I'd set for myself were identical to the physical fitness requirements demanded of candidates entering Ranger School: forty-nine pushups in two minutes, fifty-nine sit-ups in two minutes, six pull-ups in one minute, a two-mile run in fifteen minutes, a five-mile run in forty, and a sixteen-mile walk with a sixty-five pound rucksack in five hours (the latter simulated on a variable-pitch treadmill humping an ALICE pack stuffed with eighty pounds of barbell disks).

"You know I'm right," I said with a crooked, cocky grin.

"Yeah," Sauer nodded. "And _you_ know that's not the only ticket you have to get punched before you can get out of here and back to Fort Campbell." He let the last comment hang heavy in the air between us for a minute.

I shot him a dark, angry look and dug into the pockets of my sweatpants for my weightlifting gloves, then shook my head and began walking towards the bench press as I jerked those gloves on my sweaty hands.

"You know the score, Booth," I heard him say as he followed me. I didn't even make eye contact with him as I loaded enough plates on the bar to set me up for a 250-pound lift. I sat down on the bench, tightened the Velcro on the wrists of my gloves, then lay back on the bench and wrapped my fingers around the bar. "I'm the one who will vouch for your _physical_ fitness to return to duty, but you know was well as I do that that Captain Marchand is going to issue a report if you're _psychologically _fit to go back."

I didn't say a word, but just grimaced and grunted as I pushed the heavy barbell off the rack without so much as asking for Sauer's help. I'd spent four hours a day in physical therapy every day for months, and an hour each of those days in counseling, being forced to talk about and relive the very last things in the world I wanted to think about.

"_Sergeant Seeley Joseph Booth," I told my interrogator, a major in the Republican Guard. "159-38-2831."_

_He slapped me hard across the face and asked again. "You are 101st," he said, his accent crisp as if he'd learned English watching Masterpiece Theater. "We know by your patches. You are a sniper. We know by the equipment you were carrying when you surrendered..."_

_I didn't surrender. I fought back, but there were too many of them, and with a zillion tiny pieces of fragmentation grenade burning into my back and right thigh, it hurt to breathe, never mind move, and with their AK-47s and all their bleating Arabic shouting they overpowered me. I wanted to tell the Iraqi major to fuck off, that I didn't surrender, but I focused on what I'd learned in training: give 'em name, rank and serial number, and not a goddamn word more. _

"_Sergeant Seeley Joseph Booth," I told him again, trying to keep my voice even and vacant of the smallest hint of emotion, whether fear or anger. "159-38-2831."_

"_You bastard son of a whore," the Iraqi officer snarled at me, drawing the pistol he wore on his hip and rearing his arm back before he clocked me in the jaw with the handle of his Tokarev. I heard my tooth crack before I felt the pain. _

_"Nnnngth." I shut my eyes as I tried to shut out the sharp surge of pain while my mouth filled with blood. "S-s-shergeant S-sheeley..." The right side of my face felt like it was on fire. Still, I prayed silently as I struggled to get the words out: "I...am...I, uh...nngggmmm...S-s-shergeant..." I spat blood to clear my mouth and splattered the Iraqi major's uniform shirt. "S-s-sergeant...Seeley..." _

_"Holy Mary, Mother of God," I murmured, my words silent but in my own mind and, I hoped, the ears of the Blessed Virgin and her Son. "Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."_

_I finally opened my eyes again, swallowing the blood that had welled up in between my broken tooth and my cheek and feeling how weird it felt and tasted after going twelve hours without a drop of water to drink. _

_"Sergeant Seeley Joseph Booth," I declared. "159-38-2831..."_

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, I met with Captain Marchand, a thin-lipped thirty-something Ph.D. in psychology who had himself never been in combat, never mind killed a man or watched one die.

At first, I despised him. I didn't want to talk about Corporal Parker, or Sergeant Matthews, or the circumstances under which they died, each one in my arms, their lives bleeding into my BDUs and soaking into the thirsty, colorless sand that was everywhere around us. I didn't want to talk about my dad or my mom. I didn't want to talk about any of it. I wanted to get back in the game: to strap boots to my feet and a fifty-pound rucksack to my back, go out there and start sending hot lead downrange again. To do what I do, not piss and moan about it. But in order to do _that, _I was told, we had to do _this._

We talked about what had happened in that _wadi _where I lost Parker and that dusty courtyard in Samawah where Matthews and I got pinned down. We talked about the days I spent as a POW, my back and thigh peppered with shrapnel and my feet smashed to pieces with a blackjack.

We talked about how I felt when all that happened and how I felt about it afterwards, and about what he called "coping strategies"—mindfulness and deep-breathing techniques I could use to _"slow things down" _when I felt the anger or anxiety start uncoiling inside of me, or the memories flicker before my eyes. Still, for all his good intentions, I hated it. I hated every damn minute of those sessions. _I made it, didn't I? _I remember thinking. Marchand told me I had to do more than "just survive," that I had it in me to not just survive, but thrive, in the Army and in whatever I did with my life afterwards, if I could manage to work through what had happened to me _over there. _

"Captain Marchand thinks you're ready," Sauer explained, smiling as he gave me the kind of long, appraising up and down look that I'd punch another guy in the face for if he'd done it to me in a bar. "And I think you are, too."

"But?" I prompted him. There was _always_ a but.

"But we want to make sure."

I frowned. "_We?_" I grunted as I did a couple of reps and heaved the barbell back up in the rack. "I don't like this." Rubbing my eyes with my still-gloved knuckles, I growled and sat up, leaning into my thighs as I caught my breath. "So, wait—you and Marchand want to take me to the beach to make sure I've got my head screwed back on well enough to go back into combat unit? Is that it?" Sauer arched an eyebrow and gave his head a little wobble that said more than anything that might have actually come of his mouth at that point. "Okay," I said. "Fine." I thought about the whole notion for a second. As stupid as it sounded, it couldn't be worse than continuing to sit around Walter Reed with my thumb up my ass. _Whatever, _I told myself, then smirked and added, "Well, it's good thing we did all that aquatherapy crap, since now at least I have a decent pair of swim trunks."

Early the next morning, the four of us—me, Sauer, Marchand and another guy, Staff Sergeant Jason Costa—piled into a nondescript white van with government plates and drove three hours out to Ocean City, Maryland. We got there around half past ten, by which point the beach was already starting to fill up.

We set ourselves up with the cheap beach towels and plastic folding beach chairs we bought at an Eckerd Drug store on the way into town.

I heard the _gooaw _sound of the seagulls and the soothing monotony of the waves crashing over and over again on the sand a few feet away and smiled, briefly reminded of all the times my mom and dad—and later Pops and Nan—would take me and Jared down to the Jersey Shore when we were kids.

"Nice, isn't it?" Marchand asked, his thin lips curved into a smile as his eyes watched me from behind a pair of black Ray-Bans that reminded me of the Blues Brothers.

"Yeah," I said, taking a long, deep breath as I felt the hot summer sun warm my skin through my shirt.

I looked down at the pale beigish-gray sand as I unfolded the legs of my chair and felt a weird twinge as my chest got a little tight. I felt my heart begin to race and suddenly remembered digging into a position behind an embankment on one side of an irrigation canal about a half mile off Highway 8, the main artery connecting Bagdhad to Kuwait. I heard a sound, a sharp shout, as I blinked away the memory of looking over my shoulder and seeing Vroljik, another guy from my company, fall face-first into that loose, dull gray-beige sand. Some school-aged kids were squawking and squealing as they ran down the beach with a kite.

_Breathe, _I told myself. _You're at the beach. Not in the sandbox. You're on a beach full of people with kids and kites and umbrellas and a boardwalk full of tourists behind you. _

I shook my head and shugged away the memory from _over there, _then draped my towel over the back of my beach chair. I looked up and caught Marchand watching me. Without a word or even a nod to acknowledge him, I yanked off my sun-faded Flyers ballcap and tossed it on the seat of my chair.

I turned and looked over at Costa. He was like me, a city kid—he grew up on Chicago's South Side, where his immigrant father ran a Greek diner—and he, too, had ended up in Walter Reed after getting hurt in Iraq. He'd been in a mechanized company in the First Infantry Division ("The Big Red One"). The Bradley Fighting Vehicle he was riding in hit a land mine during the assault on Safwan, and when the Bradley was knocked on its side, Costa ended up with a bad leg break and a skull fracture.

I'd met him in the therapy room when he was working with Sauer on exercises to strengthen his right leg, which had been cobbled together with plates and screws since he broke not just one, but both of the bones in his lower leg.

I knew within five minutes of meeting him that Costa's busted-up leg was the least of his problems. I could tell immediately that something was off just by the way he talked to Sauer: his speech had a strange cadence, slightly hesitant and bland, and there was something vaguely mechanical in the way the words came out of his mouth. But it was when Sauer introduced us that I knew he was in way, _way_ worse shape than me. His brown eyes were a little glassy, dull and slow to react when you said something. Talking to Costa was strange, too—he was so literal, he was almost robotic, and he didn't get jokes. He left what I imagined was his jocular Greek sense of humor somewhere back in the Iraqi desert.

"Ready, buddy?" I said to him, my voice almost older-brotherly even though I was only twenty-one and he was twenty-six. I gave him a pat on the back and an encouraging smile.

"Yeah, man," Costa answered with a goofy grin and a nod as we peeled off our T-shirts, kicked off our flip-flops and raced into the surf. "Let's do it."

I sprinted down that slope and splashed into the water, trying not to think about the way the broken shells on the edge of the tide-line pressed into the soles of my newly-healed feet or the pockmarked face of the Iraqi major that came to mind as I felt the sharp edges dig in with each step.

_"Booth!"_

It was when I heard Costa's voice call my name that I brought myself back to the present.

The water was fantastic—clear and calm and just cool enough to be refreshing—and I walked into the surf, just standing there as the water lapped rhythmically at my lower back. I looked down and saw the little fish zipping around, weaving in between my legs. As soon as the school of tiny fish passed me by, I looked down and saw the pattern of swirled brushlike strokes in the sand as it had been sculpted by the current. I was suddenly reminded of seeing the same texture beneath my boots as I ran through that _wadi _carrying Parker fireman-style on my back, trying to run as quickly as I could with 150 pounds of dead weight draped over my shoulders.

_"You're gonna be okay," _I kept telling him as I felt his body slack and his fingers' grip on my shirt loosen. _"You're gonna be okay, buddy. You can do it..."_

I felt faint standing there in the surf, and I looked up with a sense of shame as my eyes met Sauer's. I saw his little blond eyebrows pop up over the rims of his aviator sunglasses and he gave me a slow, mute nod.

_I'm gonna be okay, _I told myself as I tore my eyes away from the memory-triggering underwater sand and walked my way back to shore. _I can do this. _

I was walking back to the little spot where the four of us had set our cheap drugstore beach chairs when something soft clobbered me hard in the back of the head.

Turning around, I saw a little Hispanic boy—six, maybe seven years old—standing in the shallowest part of the surf with his hands at his side and a guilty look in his brown eyes. I glanced down and saw a bright green Nerf football laying in the wet sand.

"I'm so sorry," said a young woman in a very revealing red bikini that left little to my twenty-one year-old imagination as she jogged up to me. "My son, Ishmael, he didn't mean it..."

I reached down and picked up the ball, holding it in my hand and for a moment just savoring the way it felt to hold a football again. Giving the foam ball a squeeze, I looked up at the boy's mother and smiled, holding her gaze for a second as her dark eyes met mine.

"It's no problem," I assured her. While I'm not sure how I knew, I had a sense she was alone, and so I took a chance. Flashing her a wide, toothy smile, I held up the ball and gestured towards Ishmael with a soft jerk of my chin. "Do you think he'd like to, uhh, you know—throw the ball around with me and my Army buddy over there?" I turned and used the football to point at Costa, who was treading water about thirty feet out and waved when I caught his eye.

The young mother looked at me for a moment—probably trying to decide if I was a psycho-killer nutwad or was putting the moves on her—and gave Costa a quick, discerning look before she turned to her young son.

"Ishmael," she said to him with a sweet smile on her face that coaxed the same from the boy. "_¿Te gustaría jugar con...?_" She turned to me with an awkward smile.

"Booth," I told her with a friendly grin. "My name's Booth, and that's my buddy Costa..."

She nodded and turned back to the boy who was watching us expectantly, his eyes darting over to look at his football which I was still holding. As his mother spoke again, I held out the ball to him.

_"¿Te gustaría jugar con Booth y Costa?" _she asked him. "I bet Booth can teach you how to throw the ball real good."

Nodding with unrestrained enthusiasm as his brown eyes lit up, Ishmael walked over and touched the ball but didn't try to take it from me. "Maybe you can throw it to me, _señor?_" he asked.

"Yeah, sure," I told him, pointing down the beach a short ways as Ishmael began to jog, looking over his shoulder for a pass. I threw him the ball, a tight but gentle spiral, and as soon as I saw him catch it and hug that spongy green Nerf ball to his little boy belly, I gestured for Costa to come out of the water.

I took a deep breath and turned to look back at Sauer and Marchand, who sat lazily in their beach chairs where they'd been watching us the whole time. Marchand acknowledged me with a curt nod while Sauer grinned and gave me an "ok" sign.

Two weeks later, I was back at Fort Campbell.

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"Come on, Bones," I pleaded with her. "It's a long weekend, and we just closed that case. This is the perfect time to get away. We haven't been away, you and me—you know, _together? _It's the perfect weekend to do it. And Labor Day's our last chance to get away before all the good beach towns shut down for the season."

She fought me on it, the way I knew she would. "Now that my symptoms of morning sickness have eased," she explained. "I have a lot of work to catch up on at the lab."

I rolled my eyes. "Which will still be there waiting for you when we come back from a nice, long weekend at the beach, right?"

"Booth," she protested, the creaking pitch in her sigh a dead giveaway that I had worn her down almost to the breaking point.

I thought back to that trip I took to the shore twenty years earlier and, after thinking about it for a moment, I knew I had her.

"You know," I said with a grin, my voice edged with laughter as I walked over and tucked myself right behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist as I pressed a kiss to that beautiful curve of soft ivory skin where her neck and shoulder met. "It's scientifically proven that long weekends at the beach have therapeutic value."

"Hmm." She turned her head and shot me an amused, narrow-eyed look. "Beach therapy?" she laughed. "I've never heard of it."

"Neither had I," I told her, letting my lips migrate up to that heavenly spot below her earlobe that I'd learned to love over the last four months. I placed a gently sucking kiss there and ground my crotch into her ass where I knew she'd feel how much I wanted her.

She made a kittenish little sound and I felt her tense before she twisted away from me and turned around, leaning against my kitchen counter.

"So," she said with a crooked grin and a soft laugh, her cheeks faintly flushed from my strategically-placed (and apparently persuasive) kisses. "You've tested this particular form of therapy yourself and found it curative?"

I looked away for a moment and remembered standing on the beach in Ocean City tossing around a water-logged Nerf football with a fatherless Puerto Rican boy named Ishmael and a brain-damaged soldier named Costa. For the three of us, sharing that moment in time before we went back to our lives and everything became real again, a day at the beach was a form of therapy all its own.

I smiled at the memory, then stepped forward, cupped my hand around her jaw and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Absolutely," I told her. "More than I would have imagined."

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A/N: _This story came to me while relaxing in the sun and listening to the waves on Nokomis Beach, a public beach on Florida's west coast. There's something curative about a relaxing day at the beach, which got me to thinking, which in turn led to this story, which I hope you liked._

_But please, don't leave me in the dark. Please tell me my hours of toil in the Florida sun were worth it *grin* All you people out there who read but don't review, introduce yourselves. Tell me you're out there and want me to keep cranking out stories. It's highly motivating to get reviews. :-)_

_So, share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please consider leaving a review._

_In any case, thanks for reading!_


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